Ukuleled Part 2: Uncle Hendo Delivers!

Shot footage for a local play today in a cemetery. Two hours of screaming, hateful, bigoted crap about "the homosexual abomination". Seriously, folks, at times, I just wanted to STOP talking and quit saying that crap. My heart was not into it. (Ah well, somebody has to be the bad guy in this shindig.)
I'll post footage after Bob edits it together and posts it on Youtube.

After the shoot, I wandered over to Hendo's for a bit. I knew that he was home from work and I had nothing better to do, until later that evening. We enjoyed a very nice dinner, me, Hendo and Megan. I watched my first episode of Scrubs and liked it.

As I was leaving, Hendo reminded me that he's going to loan me something for a while. He pointed up over his door at this item. Which was still in the box.



THANKS HENDO!

Oh boy!
My first ukulele!
Still MINT, IN THE BOX.
On loan!

As you can see, I am cuh-rayzee for it.


(Note to self: You really can't tell that I don't have any pants on in that picture. I've got to remember that. That info might come in handy!)

I fiddled around on the Interwebz, looking for a good tutorial on the instrument and I found THIS amazing site. Pineapple Pete's Uke School.

What an amazingly comprehensive site! The tutorial is simple and easy to use. Before I left the site, I successfully tuned my "uke", learned the "C" and the "F" chords, learned how to properly hold my uke and began strumming. All of the tools on the site are SUPER easy to use. (Of particularly keen mention is the tuning instruments. Click on the string you want to tune and leave the curser on it and it repeats the note in one second intervals, which allows you to adjust your strings and tune the uke properly. Fucking brilliant.)

Now that I've got my instrument and a good teacher and a song that I want to sing, alls I gotta' do is sit down an apply myself to learnin' the actual particulars of the instrument.



As I walked home tonight, carrying my new treasure, I wondered to myself if it was "normal" for a grown man, in his 30's, to want to learn a new musical instrument. Especially a very, very goofy new instrument. And not to woo girls or get his rock on, but to be able to play novelty songs in a small, blackbox theater, burlesque show.
I suspect that most men don't even think to try this. It just doesn't come up, in their day-to-day. They're too busy doing other things.
In the end, I decided that I clearly wasn't the best judge of what is or isn't "normal". I can only say what is normal for me. And I remember that last summer, around this time, I took up the soprano recorder. So, picking up the ukulele this summer isn't all that much of a surprise. It's actually quite normal. For me, that is.